Thursday, October 6, 2016

Microsoft's Lack Of Engineering

If you have a windows PC you might have Windows Defender turned off. Why? Well, because of all the false positives it generates.
Even worse is its behavior of flagging errors in finding what its detecting and never prventing a dismal screen to the end users to encourage rporting that set of errors back to Microsoft.

The symptom is the same you see with Plane or Train crashes. A system is designed for some safety aspect or concern, but due to all the false positives the USERS of the system learn not trust it or even worse learn to turn it off and end up triggering crashes.

This is the crux of engineering as we are not building a system to manage a computer. We are building a system to make it easier to do something but has its responsibility to encourage humans to make the right decisions.

It would be easy to state that it's just one smal thing with Microsoft. But, it permeates the whole company from its lack of discipline in UX(3 free OS versions just to fix the UX) to its lack of discipline in security in getting just Windows Defender to deliver only true postives and negatives.

This is why I insist in being interviewed only by co-founders and founders of start-ups as I want to find out if the top of the start-up will let me set-up discipline in engineering and enforce it. It does not make sense to me to get hired and take their money if the top management is going to destroy all my discipline to the point where its reflected in end users using the software in a way that it was not designed for.

I want to find a start-up that happens to need an android developer and happens to want me to be happy actually using all the computer science and engineering stuff to actually come up with a system that pleases me by pleasing end users.
But, that has to be founded on some actual discipline and the management team that is willing to not compromise.

Its hard to find something of that nature. Too many start-ups with the Wells Fargo disease of lets strive for some immediate goal and screw the long-term consequences.